This thesis presents data from ground camera observations of the aurora conducted from Alaska during the winters of 2005 through 2007. In conjunction with these camera observations, conjugate radar observations of the auroral ionosphere were...

The auroral zone is a rich source of natural radio emissions that can be observed in space and at ground-level. By studying these waves, scientists can gain insight into the plasma processes that generate them and use the near-Earth space...

Sexual selection is a driver of biodiversity and creates spectacular forms of variation. However, only recently have we begun to understand how this variation operates on the postcopulatory level and how cryptic mechanisms affect male-male...

Since their discovery in laboratory plasmas in the 1920s, Langmuir waves have been observed to be ubiquitous in plasma environments, particularly in space plasmas. From the greater solar wind to planetary foreshocks and the auroral ionosphere,...

The ionosphere is the primary source for heavy ions which are ubiquitous in the terrestrial magnetosphere. Low-altitude energization in the auroral ionosphere results in bulk heating and transverse acceleration of ions, which begin to upwell and/or...

The main research objective of this thesis is to address distributed target tracking for mobile sensor networks. Based on real-life limitations, we are particularly interested in mobile sensors with Limited Sensing Range (LSR). There are three...

Our conscious experience of memory often includes reconstuctions of the past in order to fill the gaps of forgotten events and details. The goal of this thesis is to use the tools of cognitive neuroscience to better understand the cognitive and...

The thesis is devoted to the effects of electromagnetic coupling between the Earth's magnetosphere and the active auroral ionosphere. The research has been focused, in particular, on the concept of ionospheric feedback instability. The feedback...

Loss processes greatly impact the dynamics of the Earth's radiation belts. In 1996, a balloon-borne germanium detector flown over Kiruna, Sweden detected the first terrestrial X-rays with energies on the order of 1 MeV. The spectrum for these...

Electric fields in the high-latitude regions of Earth's ionosphere are an important component of the coupled magnetosphere-ionosphere-thermosphere system. Characterizing the average behavior of these fields (or the corresponding drifts) is useful...

The ability to forecast the weather of the geospace environment depends critically on the ability to accurately model the dynamics of the coupled magnetosphere-ionosphere (MI) system. The MI interaction involves a set of electrodynamic and plasma...

Two auroral sounding rocket case studies, one in the dayside and one in the nightside, explore aspects of poleward boundary aurora. The nightside sounding rocket, Cascades-2 was launched on 20 March 2009 at 11:04:00 UT from the Poker Flat Research...

Currently, the hypothesis that discrete auroral arcs are produced by fluxes of magnetospheric electrons accelerated along the ambient magnetic field into the ionosphere by linear/non-linear mechanisms associated with magnetic field-aligned currents...

In this thesis data from four sounding rocket experiments (PHAZE II, SIERRA, RACE and HIBAR) are used to explore the high and medium frequency waves seen in the auroral ionosphere. All rockets were launched into active aurora and carried both...

Earth's high latitude ionosphere, highly disturbed by particle and energy inputs and associated aurora, is the stage for plasma wave activity across a wide range of frequencies. These waves often exhibit strikingly distinct time-frequency structure...

A VersatIle Electromagnetic Waveform (VIEW) receiver was deployed at South Pole station in December 2002 in order to measure the fine structure of auroral radio emissions with high resolution and an unprecedented 500-1000 kHz bandwidth. Using this...

Measurement of the ionospheric thermal particle population bridges the two different communities of ground-based radar and space-based rocket studies, which have the common goal of characterizing heavy ion transport in the cusp/cleft region. We...

As a result of an unstable plasma stratification the nighttime equatorial ionosphere is subject to a variety of plasma instabilities known commonly as equatorial spread-F. In its fully developed form spread-F consists of large wedges of depleted...